Max Bruch. Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor. Op. 6

Performed at the Bemidji Symphony Orchestra’s Believe in the Power of Music concert on May 15, 2022 at the Bemidji High School Auditorium, conducted by Dr. Beverly Everett and with featured soloist Timothy Pinkerton, violin.
PROGRAM NOTES
Featured Soloist Biography: Timothy Pinkerton
Pinkerton is a homeschooled sophomore at Bemidji High School, studying violin with Dr. Eric Olson. Timothy is from Bemidji, MN, and began playing the violin at age six. He joined the Bemidji Symphony Orchestra at age ten and took the position of principal 2nd violin at age thirteen. He performed as a soloist during the BSO’s 2020 Summer Pop-Up Concerts and performed Schindler’s List with the BSO in February 2021.
Timothy previously studied violin with Ashley Hodapp, Matthew Mindeman, and Jeremy Swider. He started as a member of the Headwaters Youth Orchestra for several years under the direction of Andrew Green. He is currently the concertmaster of the Bemidji High School Symphony Orchestra and frequently performs as a soloist with the BHS Chamber Orchestra.
Timothy has been a part of the Minnesota All-State Orchestra for two years as a first violin. He was the recipient of the Region 2 Arts Council Young Artist Grant in 2020 and participated in Bravo! North, a music festival for advanced string players and pianists in 2016. He has also studied piano, mandolin, and guitar over the years.
(This biographical note is taken from page 36 of the Bemidji Symphony Orchestra’s 2021-22 season concert program.)
Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26 by Max Bruch
Bruch’s father was a civil servant and wanted his son to study law. Bruch’s mother, a professional singer, was his first music teacher. Bruch was indoctrinated into the conservative Romantic camp of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms (as opposed to the Liszt-Wagner school of liberals.) At the age of twenty, Bruch wrote his first opera, and settled down to teach at the Cologne Conservatory, where he continued to compose until he was offered, after the huge success of the violin concerto we are about to hear, a professorship at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. When he died peacefully in his Berlin villa in 1920, the world around him had changed beyond recognition from the good old days of his friendship with Brahms.
Bruch is known today mostly as a one-work composer, the G minor concerto being the one work. Of the four most famous German violin concertos (Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, and Brahms) Bruch’s concerto is “the richest, the most seductive, the most euphonious,” according to the greatest violin virtuoso of the late 19th century, Joseph Joachim. The Vorspiel (Prelude) immediately confirms this judgment, as the orchestra and soloist alternate sensuous flourishes in a dreamy variant of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. After a couple of interesting new themes, it sounds like the development section should begin, but instead Bruch brings back the flourishes of the opening and sinks gracefully into the Adagio, and here we find the deepest soul of the entire work. The perennially fresh and touching lyric rapture is heightened by the composer’s artfully cultivated form, proportion, and presentation of increasingly beautiful melodies. The finale is a sparkling, crackling, Gypsy-inspired frolic.
(Program notes are from the Bemidji Symphony Orchestra’s 2021-22 concert program, p. 37. and were written by Dr. Patrick Riley.)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This activity was funded, in part, by a grant from the Region 2 Arts Council funded by an appropriation from the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the State’s General Fund.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *